Graphics and Windowing

Drivers

  • vesad (VESA)

It's not really a driver, it writes to a framebuffer given by firmware (via UEFI or BIOS software interrupts).

Because we don't yet have a dedicated GPU driver, instead relying on what firmware gives us.

  • GPU drivers

In Linux/BSDs, the GPU communication with the kernel is done by the DRM system (Direct Renderig Manager), which Mesa3D drivers use to work (Mesa3D implement OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, DRM expose the hardware interfaces).

Said this, on Redox the GPU driver needs to be a user-space daemon which use the kernel functions to talk with hardware.

The last step is to adapt our Mesa3D fork/recipe to use these user-space daemons.

Orbital

Orbital provides a display server, window manager and compositor.

The display server is written in Rust, thus being an alternative to Wayland/X11.

Current features:

  • Custom Resolutions
  • App Launcher (bottom bar)
  • File Manager
  • Text Editor
  • Calculator
  • Terminal Emulator

Accelerated Graphics

We don't have GPU drivers yet but LLVMpipe from Mesa3D is working.